It was like throwing an early Christmas party where Facebook handed over opportunities to garner more emails on a silver plate. Marketers who are aware of Twitter’s lead generation cards might have already pointed out Facebook lead ads to be it’s better version. Those who are not aware of all the fuss about Twitter, can peacefully proceed to fuel their excitement for Facebook lead ads.

Facebook lead ads takes the “sign-up” option in link ads to an advanced level. Here your users can signup or subscribe for newsletters, contest, or any such information without having to leave the network. Now, isn’t that cool?

If you are looking for an easy and profitable Facebook advertising tool, then login to AdEspresso. Whether you are looking to grow your fan base or create community engagements or may be, sell your product, this tool will make it all seamless for you. After all, it’s always great to have a tool that will optimise your efforts that will actually give you the outcome you are looking for. Its like getting your Facebook ad optimised while you sit back and sip on your morning espresso!

How a Facebook Lead Ads works?

Simple and effective is what defines Facebook lead ads. When a user clicks on the “subscribe” or “signup” or any other call-to-action button placed in the ad, he/she is automatically redirected to a form. This form looks very much similar to those we use in inbound marketing, but the difference here is Facebook does the filling up part. Yes, you heard it right. Your users are signed up or subscribed with you in two taps. One tap takes them to the form, Facebook does the hard work by filling in all the information from the user’s profile, another tap and its done!

In two taps your leads are captured, without leaving Facebook. Want to start creating a lead ad form right away? Read here to know how to Integrate Facebook Lead Ads with CRM & Email Automation. You can avoid the hassle of uploading the CSV files and syncing your CRM with your Facebook account with AdEspresso. Your custom audiences are absolutely up-to-date in less than a minute as you seamlessly connect your email marketing or CRM tool using AdExpresso.

Now that you have a guide to create a lead form and all the information needed for the same, let’s focus on the primary things that needs to be taken care of before you set out to start using Lead ads.

What makes a Facebook lead Ad successful?

While there is no definite guide, there are few components that catalyse the success of your Facebook lead ad.

Visuals

Visual content garners the attention easily and quickly. If your ad image is attractive, your ad is bound to create an engagement. By attractive, I definitely don’t mean any bold image will work. Rather, I’d say an image that conveys your business strongly along with being eye-catching, works the best. Whatever content you use, your image is the first thing your target lead will lay eyes on.

Target oriented ad

You cannot create an ad that will not connect with your target audience. If your target leads do not find your ad relevant, your time and effort goes for a complete waste. You can use Relevance Score feature for Facebook ads to keep a check on your ad status.

Convincing ad

If you say you have the best services, your target audience may just skip your ad. Everyone calls themselves best to sell. What’s your unique value proposition then? Rather, if you say more than 1M people love you or you offer a discount of 25%, your ad have higher chances of getting clicked.

Well, it doesn’t quite end here. Your ad may have a great image, right content and is targeted to the right audience. But if there is not Call-to-action button, it becomes a dull ad. CTA doesn’t mean a bright coloured button asking users to subscribe or may be signup only. Rather it completes your whole process of convincing your leads. So, try phrases like “Get 25% off on XYZ“.

Handy tips to create Facebook Lead Ads

As cool as it sounds, here are some handy tips to keep in mind when you are creating a Facebook lead ad for your business.

Your ad requires leads to take actions immediately. Hence you will need to provide more context. You don’t need to surprise them. It is necessary you tell them what they are signing up for. For example, “Click here to signup for free“.

Coupons and incentives are more proven methods to convince your lead to share their information

Your value proposition should be reflected. Users must know that by sharing their information they won’t get stumped later. There is no separate landing page here. So treat your ad like one. Tell them explicitly why they should share their details with you

Take caution with CTR, i.e. Click-through rates. Many-a-times, best converting post-click lead ads fail due to low click-through rates. If your ad is too much “form-like” and your CTR drops below 1%, it is only a matter of time that delivery will drop. So, it is necessary to optimise and try out new creatives on a regular basis to keep the CTR high

Convincing your leads is not just restricted to an engaging image or context or content. Users have become smart and they are always looking at what benefits they will get immediately after signing up. If you have compelling offers or rewards that add value, it will speed up for lead capturing process. For example, you can give free PDFs, coupons, etc.

Facebook Lead Ad Examples – Success Stories

Facebook lead ads are enabling businesses to connect with their users in ways more than one. It is easy, fast and seamless! Placing an ad that would interest them while they are going through their news feed on their mobiles, has generated more lead captures than ever. For instance, Land Rover wanted to create a seamless experience for its target audience spanning across all devices. All they had to do is create a lead ad and let users ask for a car quote from their mobiles.

“In early A/B testing, Facebook’s native lead ads outperformed link ads driving to the website to fill out a lead form in terms of total leads and conversion rate, while driving a 4x reduction in cost per lead compared to previous social lead generation tactics”

~ Kim Kyaw, Manager, Digital Marketing & Social Media, Land Rover

Similarly, Properati, a Latin-American real estate marketplace used lead ads to capture email IDs of interested users on mobile phones.

Facebook lead ads can be successful based on a variety of factors. Out of many, the placement of the ad plays a pivotal role in engaging target leads and catalysing the success of your lead ad. Whatever type of ad you want to create, there are two basic formats that are applicable for every lead ad.

Right-hand Column Ad

This the first type of advertising on Facebook that exists till date. These ads are placed on the right-hand column of a user’s news feed. For an ad of this format to succeed, it needs to have:

A well-defined value proposition

Eye-catching visual

Convincing call-to-action button

This format is only applicable on desktop/laptop.

News Feed Ad

This type of ad appears directly in the user’s news feed. Since these appear while a user is scrolling through the news feed, they are more likely to create a higher level of engagement. However, these ads can be costly too.

There are several other types of Facebook lead ads that you can take note of:

Video Ad

According to the Q4 earnings, almost 100 million hours are spent by users in video watching! Hence, it isn’t surprising that brands are using videos to engage users and capture more lead emails.

Cheetah Mobile, a Chinese mobile company acquired 20 million players globally for their game Piano Tiles 2. Their photo and video mobile ads showcased simple in-game screenshots and clips from the game showing how the game is played. Piano Tiles 2, a sequel to Piano Tiles, is an addictive game where you tap on the black tiles to create music and compete with other gamers across the globe.

Photo Ad

Video is followed by photo ads. An image is more convincing and can be easily related to. So, if you are looking to sell your product or service, put up a real convincing image and get going.

NewBorn Town, another Chinese mobile internet company used Facebook lead ads and Instagram to reach out to everyone on mobile across the globe, especially in US. Their success story shows 38% more installs, 22% lower cost per acquisition and 6.7% higher retention using Instagram ads. The target audience was those using Android devices since Solo Launcher is available only for Android users.

Multi-product ad

You have more than one product? Showcase them altogether and get your leads to take notice. You can provide individual links over all the images or have a single call-to-action button. You can use this type of ad for your blogs or ebooks as well.

John Lewis turned to Instagram to “change perceptions” as a fashion retailer. They used long quarterly campaign called ‘The Edit’ that highlighted the latest looks and trends. Their success story reveals a 10-point lift in ad recall and 3-point lift in brand favorability among females of 18 years to 24 years.

Local Ad

Do you have a business that thrives on physical locations? Then this type of ad is best for you. You can drive your lead targets to signup or subscribe by telling them about your services/products that they can avail around their locality or in their choice of locality. You can target your ad accordingly!

Housing.com used Facebook lead ads to less expensive leads. With a customised mobile signup form, it was easier to collect emails of interested leads. It helped in finding quality leads quicker. Statistics show a 50% lower cost on every lead and 7 times more leads in a span of 5 days.

Offer Ad

If you have some exciting offers to give, then this is your chance. You can promote a discount or coupon which your users can redeem on Facebook. Why make your users wait in a queue? Drive them directly to the offer.

Sona MedSpa used mobile lead ads to reach out to both male and female clients in around 7 US markets. There were promotions and free-of-charge consultancy offers. Prospective users could easily submit information as information in the form was already pre-filled from their Facebook profiles. The mobile lead ads generated nearly twice more leads as compared to link ads and also there was cost per lead was lowered by 66%.

Retargeting Ad

When you promote your ad to a specific group of audience that has already been identified, it is called retargeting. Incase you find it hard to relate, remember those amazon deals you keep seeing constantly while browsing through your Facebook newsfeed? Those are retargeting ads.

New Zealand based Flick Electric Co. drives sales through Facebook retargeting ads. It shares anything like news articles, videos, images, updates atleast twice every week. They strategically boost their post and retarget their identified set of audience.

Boost Ads

A boost ad is an organic ad that had appeared on the brand’s Facebook page originally. It is later boosted with advertising money. This type of ad is different from the above-mentioned types since boost ads are not created on Ads Manager or Power Editor.

MomentCam, a China-based multi-platform app lets you create a cartoon version of yourself. The idea of the app is to help people make art a part of their daily lives. By boosting several page posts, they ran carousel mobile app to display various screenshots. The carousel ads obviously showed more impact for the brand. With 25% app installs coming directly from Facebook itself, MomentCam also saw equal percentile of increase in user engagement.

Facebook lead ads have definitely opened up a vista of opportunities for marketers. However, as it is said, with the good comes the bad. You might be wondering what could be bad about Facebook lead ads? Well, to point out one, creating a Facebook lead ad does benefit your business, but the shortcoming is, your target leads stays on Facebook! Lead ads do not take your leads to your landing page or website, reducing the chances of engagement with your brand. While you get email IDs, you have to cut short on the real-time engagement that can actually help you in creating a brand value. Also, if you are not prompt enough to follow up with your leads, you are sure to miss out on potential opportunities, because let’s face it: your competitors are also playing in the same field area!

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So, to avail the benefits of Facebook lead ads, make sure you have enough bandwidth to follow up with all your leads on a personal level immediately. In the digital world, if you are late you are simply out of the game!

16 Comments

Hey Pritha, the advertisement at Facebook holds real gold if one understands how it works and how to bring the maximum conversion by taking care of all the optimizations. The target audience is the real deal, and one has to dedicated more time into that section. Once target audience is set perfectly, then campaign will rock, for sure. 🙂

Why are the Facebook Lead Ads so successful? The success stories of Facebook Lead Ads are reining the internet. There is a perfect reason behind it. The visuals, convincing tone and efficient target orientation are the leading factors that gave Facebook Lead Ads this raging popularity among the marketers.

There are a number of factors that are considered to be responsible for the success of Facebook lead ads; they include the visuals, the target-oriented ads, and the convincing ads. There are some tips that must also be kept in mind for creating the Facebook lead ads in a better way.

Ankit, bearing in mind that all marketing professionals and entrepreneurs have already invested time and money into this platform, it is expected that the competition in Facebook advertising increases. Therefore, we recommend that you start the branding and advertising on Facebook sooner rather than later in order not to lag behind others. Advertising on Facebook has more than a safe place in the future internet marketing. Ergo, do not let the time run over.

Really liked your last piece of advice – to avail the benefits of Facebook ads, first make sure we have enough bandwidth to follow up/service all the leads at a personal level. Wow! It claims to create thousands of variants for one’s Facebook Ads with only three clicks. That’s worth a try for free and I am trying right away.

Facebook does the form filling in two taps! That’s incredible..kudos to the concept. Okay, one thing which i do want to ask is – do Facebook lead ads “Have” to be used in combination with Adespresso. Otherwise great article, Ankit..keep up the great show.

Thanks for time breaking recent FB results down Ankit – some helpful numbers. @BarbaraMartin – my experience of LinkedIn lead gen ads is they are super expensive to get them to work with any scale. For B2B prospecting its a workable (and potentially highly successful) platform, but I’ve found that tends to be for enterprise-level corporate clients only. One client I was working on was forecast high-quality prospects at around £250 each and that was from committing 30K a month media spend. For Linkedin prospecting on smaller scale Sales Navigator can work well – but it takes some regular and consistent time commitment over a few months to get it working. Good luck & learning everyone.